Intonation of early two-word utterances in Dutch

Abstract

We analysed intonation contours of two-word\nutterances from three monolingual Dutch children\naged between 1;4 and 2;1 in the autosegmentalmetrical\nframework. Our data show that children\nhave mastered the inventory of the boundary tones\nand nuclear pitch accent types (except for L*HL and\nL*!HL) at the 160-word level, and the set of nondownstepped\npre-nuclear pitch accents (except for\nL*) at the 230-word level, contra previous claims on\nthe mastery of adult-like intonation contours before\nor at the onset of first words. Further, there is\nevidence that intonational development is correlated\nwith an increase in vocabulary size. Moreover, we\nfound that children show a preference for falling\ncontours, as predicted on the basis of universal\nproduction mechanisms. In addition, the utterances\nare mostly spoken with both words accented\nindependent of semantic relations expressed and\ninformation status of each word across\ndevelopmental stages, contra prior work. Our study\nsuggests a number of topics for further research.

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